


You ever see a UFO in these parts?

by gravelyhumerus



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Emily Prentiss is a big x files fan, Gen, Nerd!Emily Prentiss, One Shot, The X-Files References, aliens are real, at least thats what emily wants to find out, its jemily if you squint lol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:09:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27179039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gravelyhumerus/pseuds/gravelyhumerus
Summary: Emily Prentiss likes The X-Files. It may or may not have been the reason she joined the FBI.
Relationships: Jennifer "JJ" Jareau/Emily Prentiss, Jennifer "JJ" Jareau/Emily Prentiss (implied)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 35





	You ever see a UFO in these parts?

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Spooky SZN! This isn't an X-Files au just Emily Prentiss being a big ol' nerd who searches for the truth about aliens. It's canon-compliant with a lil hint of Jemily for everyone to enjoy. 
> 
> All based off my headcanon that she loves watching The X-Files and the anons in my inbox yesterday asking about whether she's more like Mulder or Scully. Hope this answers your questions :)

Emily Prentiss’s first thought after getting the call that she had officially been accepted into the FBI was that she could finally find out whether or not aliens were real.

Scratch that, her first thought was probably:  _ oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, I am finally employed! This is so cool!  _ But right after her small freak out was the alien thing.

You see, Emily Prentiss spent most of the 90s  _ extremely _ obsessed with The X-Files. She not only watched each and every episode live, but for Christmas she always bought herself each subsequent season on DVD. Watching two FBI agents search endlessly for the truth, despite the politics and bureaucracy was probably the best thing young, rebellious, daughter-of-a-diplomat Emily Prentiss could ever see. 

Not to mention  _ Gillian Anderson _ was in it _.  _ Need she say more?

Anyways, Prentiss had to start off her career at Quantico for training, where, like always, she strived to be the best in the class. She studied hard, trained hard, and stayed in line. She knew that any mention of something spooky like The X-Files would get her sent straight out of the academy, or even cause her to fail her psych evals. She didn’t want to go the way of the fictional Fox Mulder and get herself dubbed as Spooky Prentiss before she even became an agent. 

Thus, like her nerdy love for literature and the likes of Kurt Vonnegut, Trainee Prentiss made sure to keep her minor obsession with aliens, cryptids and all things supernatural under wraps.

She wasn’t a true believer or anything. She didn’t identify with Mulder directly, having a heavy dose of skepticism about anything that science couldn’t explain. That being said, she knows that cover-ups, truth suppression and manipulation of reality was something that the bureaucrats the likes of her mother were well-versed in. 

She would not put it past the American Government to hide something as big as aliens from the public. 

Agent Emily Prentiss thought she was being smart about her clandestine motives for looking into The X Files. She waited. She waited until she was no longer a rookie, that she had earned the respect of her peers and supervisors, so they knew she was not some kook before looking into things.

At the time, files were not quite digitized yet, with cabinets of file folders strewn about record rooms throughout the field office that she was stationed in. She looked into the drawer labelled X. Hence the name: The X-Files. Nothing except a few copies of X-Rays and a few victims or perps with the last name X. 

She did this in every new administrative building, in every field office, and any government building that she had clearance to enter. She was pretty sure she had gotten placed on a watch list in her third year as an Agent. 

Prentiss did not risk asking around, and as long as no one asked, she did not tell. 

At one office birthday, a party for her coworker, Agent Mills, she heard about a man in IT that was not as bright as her.

“I heard he lost his clearance,” was the whispered water-cooler talk she overheard. “He got unofficial desk-duty.”

“What did he do?” Prentiss asked.

“He wanted to look into a closed case,” her coworker whispered back, wide-eyed, “Teenage girls claiming to be abducted.”

“ _ Really _ ?” Prentiss, said, wide-eyed. 

“No!” he replied, before the whole group burst into laughter at Prentiss’ expense. “What do you think this place is?”

The whole group burst into laughter as Prentiss’ face went hot with a blush. Emily vowed to keep her mouth shut from then on. 

As time wore on, her suspicions did not fade, but the stakes got higher as she rose the ranks. A new agent might simply get canned for looking into the wrong thing, but Prentiss slowly had more to lose, more at stake. Emily Prentiss’ desire to uncover the X-Files got placed firmly on the back burner.

During her time in Interpol, Prentiss had much bigger things to worry about than monsters who may or may not be real. Monsters were in front of her and it was her job to take them down. Supernatural be damned,  _ real _ horrors struck enough fear into her heart. 

* * *

Supervisory Special Agent Emily Prentiss’ first thought when she walked into the office of Penelope Garcia, FBI Technical Analyst, was that  _ she  _ was the kind of lady who would be able to find The X-Files. Or, whatever they were called in real life. 

But, it was not the time to ask her that. The group looked at her with distrust, pretty much all of them except Agent Jareau, who was taking her on the tour of the offices and ‘showing her the ropes.’

Prentiss was new here, and growing up  _ always _ being the new girl, she knew to keep her weirdness under wraps. She did not burst out into a nerdy rant when they had a case that looked suspiciously like vampires, or the time they had a case that truly seemed to have all of the markers of an alien abduction. 

No, Prentiss did not say any of that, not at first, at least. 

See, this team felt  _ different  _ somehow. After Prentiss almost quit—for the first time—after finding out she was a pawn of Erin Strauss’ vendetta against SSA Hotchner, she felt almost… welcome? 

She started to be invited to things. Like girls night with JJ and Garcia, or foriegn movie night with Reid, or to drinks with Morgan after a long case. For the first time in ages, people seemed to like her, even her weird stuff. 

After a few months, she found herself relaxing into this new routine and these new people. She slowly let her guard down, as far as she could reasonably manage, and revealed some of the things about herself that she normally held close to her chest.

She can only blame this, and the combination of pain pills she was taking for her recent injury she acquired in the hunt for the last unsub, for what happened. 

A small knife to her side led Prentiss to needing minor surgery and a night in a small hospital in Nevada. She had awoken to JJ sleeping at her side and a bad headache that she learned was from the concussion caused by her head hitting the concrete after being stabbed. 

Despite protesting, saying that she had been through worse, Prentiss was resigned to desk duty for almost two weeks after this incident. This meant that when the team was called away to Washington State for a new case, Prentiss was stuck sitting next to Garcia, sitting on her office chair that she had rolled down the hall. 

Now back to the whole pain pills thing. Emily Prentiss didn’t react well to narcotics. She got a bit… loopy. And only a week after her surgery, finally back in the office after recovering at home, she was still needing quite a bit of medication to keep the throbbing of her side at bay. 

So, when there was a lull in the case, with Garcia focusing on doing some more background research on their vics and herself flipping through some case files, Prentiss found herself blurting out something that she had spent her entire adult life avoiding. 

“So you ever find out if aliens are real with that thing?” She said, gesturing to Garcia’s massive computer set-up.

Immediately after she had said it, she kicked herself, her own jaw dropping in surprise after hearing them fall out of her mouth. Prentiss was mortified. It was something that she thought she had been  _ thinking _ not something she had any plans to actually  _ say out loud.  _

See, she had noticed that Garcia could basically hack anything and anyone, and there was that whole Princess Diana thing from awhile back. She was thinking a lot about how if anyone could find the truth on the matter, it would be Penelope Garcia.

“Oh I knew I liked something about you,” Garcia said, spinning around in her chair, grinning at her. “What do you want? UFOs? Abductions? Probing? You know there’s always probing!”

Emily smiled. Maybe this was where she belonged after all.

**Author's Note:**

> follow me @gravelyhumerus on tumblr for more fics and my fanart


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